What is troubling is that he (Musk) seems to think of Mars mush as early European explorers viewed Africa and the Americas, as places to be colonised regardless of the consequences.

Mars is in a pristine state and experts say it should stay that way if we are to find proof of past or present life there. Plonking a city of 1m humans on it would wreak havoc with such efforts, according to veteran space scientists such as Andrew Coates of University College London, whois working on the ExoMars rover due to launch in 2020.

Prof Coates says the big global dust storm on Mars could carry specks of terrestrial matter across the planet that scientists could mistake for evidence of Martian life. He also worries about Mr Musk’s breezy attitude to the brutally cold weather on Mars, where temperatures average minus 63C.

It’s been four years since this otherworldly stout burst out of our collective proverbial chests. Four years since the primally viscous first release ooze-snaked across the galaxy. This specialty imperial stout draws its huge flavor from wheat (that’s Wil, natch), pecans and bourbon barrels (two homages to Drew’s home of Kentucky) and Greg’s lifelong quest for pushing the limits of “why the hell not?” to make bigger, bolder beers. The result is a mind-blowing amalgamation of intense yet smooth flavors, perfect for a warm summer evening, a cozy winter’s night or the approaching destruction of the entire human race (be it externally or internally inflicted).

For this year’s bottle art, we were thrilled to entrust the task to heralded comic book writer and artist Walt Simonson. He was gracious enough to work with us in exchange for our donation to The Hero Initiative, a charity organization that provides retirement funds for golden-age comic book artists.

(3) MARVEL’S LIVESTREAM FROM SDCC. Marvel Entertainment will air the action from their booth at Comic-Con starting Thursday, July 20.

Hosted by TWHIP! The Big Marvel Show’s Ryan Penagos and Lorraine Cink, and Marvel Gaming host Jessica Brohard, viewers will be able to watch booth events with their favorite Marvel comic, television and movie talent, hear panel recaps from special guests, and learn about all the fun surprises happening on the convention floor, from exclusive merchandise to special signings. Join in on the fun by visiting www.marvel.com/SDCC2017 or Marvel’s YouTube channel.

“This is my life’s work,” said Mr. Whitmire, 58, who lives in the Atlanta area. “The only thing I’ve done my whole adult life, and it’s just been taken away from me. I just couldn’t understand why we couldn’t resolve this.”

Disney, which acquired the Muppets in 2004 from the Jim Henson Company, painted a wholly different picture, portraying Mr. Whitmire as hostile to co-workers and overly difficult in contract negotiations. Members of the Henson family said they supported the dismissal as well.

… Henson’s family, which still runs the Jim Henson Company, chose Mr. Whitmire to replace Henson as Kermit in 1990 after Henson unexpectedly died of pneumonia at the age of 53. Some of those same family members say they supported the decision to replace Mr. Whitmire, though they are no longer involved with the Muppets.

“He played brinkmanship very aggressively in contract negotiations,” Lisa Henson, president of the Jim Henson Company, and Jim Henson’s daughter, said in a telephone interview.

Ms. Henson said Mr. Whitmire was adamantly opposed to having an understudy for his role, which presented problems when it came to what she called “B-level performances, such as a ribbon-cutting.” She said he was unwilling to appear on some of these occasions but also refused to develop an understudy and that he “blackballed young performers” by refusing to appear on the show with them.

Brian Henson, the company’s chairman and Jim Henson’s son, said that while Mr. Whitmire’s Kermit was “sometimes excellent, and always pretty good,” things changed when he was off set.

“He’d send emails and letters attacking everyone, attacking the writing and attacking the director,” he said.

The point is that there is so much vital and significant knowledge that was gained by the dwindling few of us who consistently stood next to Jim. From his characters to his methods and philosophies, it’s stuff you can never fully intuit from watching the Muppets. I know that to be true because I, too, was a completely obsessive Muppet fan with preconceived notions of my own that had to be unlearned when Jim hired me in 1978.

I approach The Muppets as a lineage tradition. For the inside knowledge-base steeped in its origins to survive and be passed down, there has to be a line of transmission, or you had to be there. For the Post-Jim performers to really understand enough about the Muppets to carry on the lineage they need to continue to be around the core performers Jim mentored as long as any of those people are willing and able to share.

None of this is a value judgement of any individual, it is a pointing out of the value of historical perspective so long as that perspective is used progressively. Having had the opportunity to spend the last 27 years cultivating knowledge of Jim along with feeling his presence through Kermit, I find myself at a place where evolving Jim’s vision has begun coming from a deep empathetic connection to him.

So, I see my most important task as providing a taste of the atmosphere created by Jim Henson to those Post-Jim core performers who will never otherwise come by it. My hope was to install it directly into their hearts and minds so that they could, in turn, be inspired to do the same for the next generation of performers instead of the characters becoming stale copies of their former selves. But, as I look around at what is presently transpiring it’s clear to me that the job is far from done.

At the end of the 19th century, New York City stank. One hundred fifty thousand horses ferried people and goods through the streets of Manhattan, producing 45,000 tons — tons! — of manure a month. It piled up on streets and in vacant lots, and in 1898 urban planners convened from around the world to brainstorm solutions to the impending crisis. They failed to come up with any, unable to imagine horseless transportation.

Fourteen years later, cars outnumbered horses in New York, and visions of manure dystopia were forgotten.

If 19th-century urban planners had had access to big data, machine learning techniques, and modern management theory, these tools would not have helped them. They simply would have confirmed their existing concerns. Extrapolating from past trends is useful but limiting in a world of accelerating technological change.

Science fiction can help. Maybe you associate it with spaceships and aliens, but science fiction offers more than escapism. By presenting plausible alternative realities, science fiction stories empower us to confront not just what we think but also how we think and why we think it. They reveal how fragile the status quo is, and how malleable the future can be…..

Science fiction isn’t useful because it’s predictive. It’s useful because it reframes our perspective on the world. Like international travel or meditation, it creates space for us to question our assumptions. Assumptions locked top 19th-century minds into believing that cities were doomed to drown in horse manure. Assumptions toppled Kodak despite the fact that its engineers built the first digital camera in 1975. Assumptions are a luxury true leaders can’t afford.

In my earliest days as a pro writer, I did everything on typewriter (first manual and then electric; rumors that I chiseled them on stone tablets are just mean). I didn’t have a computer until later and, even when I did, some companies (including DC) were not equipped to receive them electronically. So that meant printing them up on my dot-matrix printer and then rushing them off to FedEx for overnight delivery.

Unless you called in your package by a certain time, usually much earlier than you had the work done, you had to take the package to the nearest FedEx office. If you didn’t hit the office by closing time (usually around 6 PM), you had to make the Midnight Run to the main FedEx office out by the largest airport around. More than once, Kim was the driver while I finished collating the pages, stuffing them in the envelope, and addressing the delivery slip. Let me tell you, Speed Racer had nothing on Kim. She’d run stoplights and take stop signs as suggestions to be ignored. Often, we’d meet other local freelancers also making the death defying Midnight Run. It almost got to be a club.

(7) TODAY IN HISTORY

July 18, 1986 – Aliens burst into theaters.

July 18, 2001 – Jurassic Park III opened.

July 18, 2008 — The Dark Knight, the fifth film in the big-screen Batman series, opens in theaters around the United States.

(8) EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE. At Fantasy Literature, Bill Capossere and Tadiana Jones each review Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean. Capossere begins:

Informative, witty, vivid, often compelling, sometimes juvenile, knowledgeable, clear, and written throughout with verve and panache via what feels like a wholly singular voice, Sam Kean’s Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us (2017) is what every non-fiction book should aspire to. It’s been a while since I’ve so enjoyed a work of non-fiction so thoroughly and consistently.

Kean divides his exploration of air into three large sections, the first dealing with the origin of our current atmosphere, one of many our planet (if not humanity) has seen….

Jones is just as enthusiastic:

Kean has a vivid and engaging style of writing, with a wry sense of humor, which elevates Caesar’s Last Breath far above most pop science books. Gas molecules are described as feral, oxygen as a madman, our moon as an albatross (as compared to the gnats that circle most other mooned planets), and gravity as “that eternal meddler” that won’t abide two planets in the same neighborhood. I learned about the Big Thwack (when a hypothetical planet called Theia smashed into our earth, vaporizing itself and eventually reforming into our moon), the Oxygen Catastrophe of 2,000,000,000 BC, and the mushroom cloud-shaped cakes baked during the heady days of the late 1940s when nuclear blasts didn’t really seem all that dangerous.

Everyone has either heard the story, or experienced it themselves: “I used to love reading AuthorX, but then I met them and discovered they are terrible. I can’t read their work anymore.” Sometimes it is hard to discover your idols are human with human wants, needs, foibles, opinions, habits, and flaws. When you work on SFWA’s Board of Directors, you usually see all the behind-the-scenes stuff.

Sometimes, you work with an author/editor on a SFWA project and it doesn’t go as smoothly as you like. Sometimes, it appears as if an author once admired has nothing but scorn for the work you are doing and no desire to help out—just kvetch and complain. Sometimes, authors come to the Board at their worst—financial or medical difficulties, personal conflicts that threaten to spiral out of control, issues with editors, agents, or publishers. They don’t have their “public face” on. They are human. They make mistakes. They can be hurt. They put their pants on one leg at a time.

This is one of those learning lessons that really surprised me. I’m not sure why. I just know it did.

In the comment thread one of the developers remarks, “That said, I am excited to see fans talking about the things that moved them that we didn’t include. Those suggestions, and the conversations they start, are to me the greatest legacy of all these inspirational media appendices.”

Few appendices have made as big a splash in gaming history as Gary Gygax’s Appendix N. (I thought Cosmo’s appendix bursting at Gen Con that one year might have it beat, but he reminded me that was technically a gallbladder removal, so it’s OUT OF THE RUNNING!) That formative list of novels hit in 1979, in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. In it, Gygax laid out some of the works that had made the largest impact on him in the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, from Leigh Brackett and Robert E. Howard to Jack Vance and Andre Norton. In doing so, he created a reading list for an entire generation of gamers and fantasy fans, and had a tremendous impact on the genre as a whole.

When we created the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook in 2009, we gleefully took the opportunity to publish our own version of Appendix N, keen to introduce fans to our new favorites like Clive Barker and China Miéville, along with grand masters like C. L. Moore. Yet it was ultimately still a fairly small list—just a single column of text—and cribbed heavily from Gygax, focusing solely on novels.

When I first sat down to paginate the Starfinder Core Rulebook, I knew that space was going to be at a premium. I had, by some estimates, 800+ pages of content to cram into something even smaller than Pathfinder’s 576 pages. Yet I also knew that just one page of inspirational media wasn’t going to be enough. In order to make a game like Starfinder, we had to stand on the shoulders of innumerable giants, both childhood heroes and our friends and peers. We couldn’t in good faith restrict ourselves to just literature, either. How could you have Starfinder without Star Wars and Alien? Without Shadowrun and Warhammer 40,000? Without Starcraft and Mass Effect? It just wouldn’t be the same.

A security robot in Washington DC suffered a watery demise after falling into a fountain by an office building.

The stricken robot, made by Knightscope, was spotted by passers-by whose photos of the aftermath quickly went viral on social media.

(13) RETURN TO TONE. Ian Leslie’s post “Unfight Club” on Medium contends there is a way to have discussions on Twitter without devolving into flame wars, virtue signalling, etc. etc. If only.

Beware the moral surge. The moral surge is the rush of pleasure you get?—?the dopamine hit?—?when you assert your moral integrity in public. A certain kind of columnist lives for it; much of social media is driven by it. Virtue signalling is its outer manifestation, but I’m talking about an inner mechanism. We’re all subject to it, and that’s not a bad thing in itself?—?it makes sense that we should feel good for ‘doing the right thing’ in the eyes of our group. But when you ingest too much of this drug, or get dependent on it, you end up giving your own bad behaviour a pass. When you’re addicted to the moral surge, personal abuse begins to seem like nothing when measured against high principles. ‘Anything I say to or about that person, however nasty or dehumanising, is justified, because they voted for austerity, which murders people,’ (the more apocalyptic your public language, the purer the hit). Letting your tribe see you condemn others feels good?—?so good that it degrades your own moral machinery. Viciousness becomes a virtue. Don’t let this happen to you: recognise your susceptibility to the moral surge, and be wary of it.

As said, diversity when looked at from that white, middle class male perspective tends to focus on who’s being written about more than on who’s doing the writing. Not that this isn’t important in its own right, but it will still reflect the same limited perspective and no matter how well intentioned, often reducing anybody who isn’t (white, male, middle class) to the exotic. Diversity from this perspective is always from the outside looking in, making it easy to fall into stereotypes, cultural appropriation, orientalism and othering. You get things like making mutants as a metaphor for the Civil Rights struggle and thinking that’s enough, or writing alternate history in which America is conveniently empty when the Europeans land. This sort of diversity is only possible if your audience and peers are the same as you, or you can at least pretend they are.

The New Weird happened at arguably the last time that you could still hold up this pretence without immediadely being contradicted by the very same people you’re denying the existence of. Twitter, Youtube and Facebook didn’t exist yet, blogging was in its infancy and existing fannish and science fiction online spaces were still dominated by, well, white middle class men. What made Racefail not just possible but inevitable was that between the New Weird and Racefail the internet became not just mainstream but ubiquitous as both access and ease of access increased; it’s no coincidence that much of Racefail took place on Livejournal, one of the earliest social media sites and one that had long been home to sf fandom. Tools or sites like Twitter or Tumblr have only made it easier for everybody to let their voice be heard, harder to ignore people when they address you directly. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but the upshot is that science fiction can no longer pretend to be just white, middle class or male.

The replacement of male with female is meant to erase femininity. In point of fact, and no matter what anyone thinks or wishes, readers and viewers have a different emotional relationship to female characters as male. This does not mean, obviously, that females cannot be protagonists or cannot be leaders. It means mothers cannot be fathers and queens cannot be kings.

It means if you want a female Norse warrior goddess, go get Lady Sif or Valkyrie, and leave Thor alone. It means if you want female Time Lady from Gallifrey, go make a spin off show starring Romana or Susan or The Rani, and leave The Doctor alone.

I have been a fan of Dr Who since age seven, when Tom Baker was the Doctor. I have tolerated years of public service announcements in favor of sexual deviance that pepper the show. But this is too much to tolerate.

The BBC has finally done what The Master, the Daleks and the Cybermen have failed to do. They killed off the Doctor.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “A Single Life” is an animated short nominated for an Oscar in 2014 by Job, Joris, and Marieke which asks what happened if you had a 45 RPM record that enabled you to travel through time?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Francis Hamit, Chip Hitchcock, and Nancy Sauer for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

@Xtifr @lurkertype
I liked it. He tried hard with the fake Shakespeare play the alt-Shakespeare in his novel wrote about Boudicca, in the world of the novel. It feels like something Shakespeare could have written anyway.

@Steve Wright: That was really interesting! It made me wonder about continuity. I’ve read an argument that comic collectors’ obsession with continuity is linked to the collector mentality. Doctor Who was much more ephemeral than comics. I wonder if that’s linked to this more casual approach to continuity?

If I had to guess, I’d venture that being regarded as a children’s show that was seldom rebroadcast was a major factor in the slack attitude to continuity. Timing, too, possibly; was continuity that big a deal in other genre shows of the ’60s and ’70s? Within an arc, sure, and even over the course of a season, but from year to year? Star Trek: TOS comes to mind as a case where the individual shows hold up, but you’ve gotta put some work into making the setting details function as a coherent whole across episodes – and that debuted only a few years later.

“Continuity on Doctor Who was what I could remember of the past and what future script editors could remember about what I’d done. Star Trek, I believe, had a bible, in which everything was laid down. We never did that on Who. There are varying accounts of almost everything. And I really don’t care. I always say: if they’re asking questions about inconsistencies, the show is not good enough.” –Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who script editor, 1968-74

Certainly, Doctor Who was regarded as ephemeral, to the point where many stories were wiped from the BBC archives. That’s not something peculiar to Doctor Who – all TV in the UK was regarded in that way.

The first person to pay any attention to continuity in Doctor Who was William Hartnell, who insisted on operating the TARDIS controls consistently from episode to episode as he felt that young viewers would notice and care about this. But there was very little attention paid to this on the production side until Terrance Dicks came in as script editor. He had a background in soap opera and under him we start to see continuity and story arcs for an ensemble cast in the Jon Pertwee / UNIT years. Even he, as Steven Mollmann says, always said that “continuity is what you can remember”.

It’s important to bear in mind that in those days not only were there no series bibles, there were none of these lovingly obsessive fan-written books detailing the show’s past, and no commercially available video releases. If, say, Terrance Dicks had wanted to check a continuity point from the Troughton years, he would have had to go to the BBC archive and arrange a special screening of the video tape for the episode in question – or of many episodes, if he wasn’t sure exactly which one contained the information in question. All this while under immense pressure to deliver good, workable scripts in bulk quantities to tight deadlines – of course he would just go with whatever he could remember and concentrate on making the current story good enough.

There was one attempt at a “series bible” of sorts, which was written for Season 16, the “Key to Time” season in which all the stories formed a single arc. It was, however, primarily concerned with esoteric spiritual speculation, rather than plot and character details, and was only ever vaguely influential upon the actual scripts.

By the 80s, illicit VHS tapes of many stories were circulating in fandom, and fans were writing reference books about the show’s past, so in principle it would be easier to have consistent continuity – to the extent that you can be consistent with something that is already inherently self-contradictory. This led to record producer and superfan Ian Levine becoming associated with the Doctor Who production office for a while, with a view to having more consistent continuity. It didn’t really work. Whether that was because it was a doomed idea from the start, or because of Mr Levine’s notorious personality problems [1], or because of the general dysfunction of Doctor Who production at the time, is a matter on which opinions vary.

In the revived series, there is still no series bible as such. However, there is a huge amount of fannish reference material, and many of the key figures in the production are massive Doctor Who fans of long standing who have lived and breathed this stuff since childhood, including all of the showrunners, many of the writers and two of the lead actors. Even so, there was still no one on set to correct Matt Smith’s pronunciation of “Spiridon”…

[1] If you’ve seen the episode “Love and Monsters”, the Absorbaloff is plainly based on Ian Levine.

Lenora Rose: being remote is even more reason to have a doctor on site, especially given the dangers of magic, quidditch, and general teen-age hijinks. (One could argue that being sick for a few days is as useful a punishment for carelessness or hijinks as docking points from one’s House — especially as it’s seemed to me that the degree of emotional binding to one’s House comes and goes as the Plot demands.) Your competent Matron could also be a magic user, if healing magic existed, or a dispenser of potions if she trusts Snape. I guess it depends on when you think which tech will become available; I’m looking at how recently we’ve developed techniques for minor vision issues versus how long we’ve had antibiotics, but that could be different in Rowling’s universe.

Iain Coleman: interesting confirmation on the lack of bible. I hadn’t heard that all TV was regarded as ephemeral; I wonder whether that reflects the BBC being ~non-commercial — from what I’ve skimmed, reruns were a significant source of US TV income even in the 1960’s.

Speaking of Terrance Dicks and Dr Who canon/continuity, the 1970’s Target novelisations also played a role both as a means of fans connecting with stories that had already aired but also in terms of establishing lore and fan-canon. Dick’s was a prolific author of these. The second-Doctor story “The Web of Fear” (1968)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_of_Fear ) is a good example of an older episode that was primarily known from its 1976 novelization because the BBC didn’t have a complete version.

Terry Pratchett used to quote that when people asked about continuity in the early days of Discworld. One of the things that made the early stories as good as they were was that he was willing to adapt the world to the needs of the story, instead of vice versa. Later on, when he was more skilled, he was able to start injecting unnecessary consistency without harming the story, to satisfy those who wanted to create maps and such. But I’m really glad he skipped the whole continuity obsession in his early days–and honestly wonder if even the later books might have even been better if he’d continued that policy.

I’ve read an argument that comic collectors’ obsession with continuity is linked to the collector mentality. Doctor Who was much more ephemeral than comics. I wonder if that’s linked to this more casual approach to continuity?

For many years, comic book continuity was just as casual as DOCTOR WHO’s. DC Comics had two contradictory Atlantises, multiple versions of Mars (all populated) and more. Even over at Marvel, characters changed names, races, stories were forgotten…

It was largely due to the influence of two creators (E. Nelson Bridwell at DC and Roy Thomas at Marvel) that continuity tightened up. Fans responded, continuity was a big thing for a few decades, and these days it’s a lot looser again, though perhaps not as loose as it used to be.

But all through that period, there were comics collectors who collected continuity-loose books like the Disney duck comics and the world of Archie Andrews and friends.

I’d say the collector mentality was alive and well in comics collecting before continuity was of much concern.

Chip: I think the emphemerality of early British TV is not so much about commerciality, more about culture. British drama in those days was strongly based in theatre, and TV was produced and regarded as “broadcast stage plays” rather than “broadcast films”. Many dramas were transmitted live – for example, we only have a recorded copy of Nigel Kneale’s seminal adaptation of 1984 because the huge public reaction to the broadcast resulted in it being repeated, which entailed literally rebuilding the sets and getting the actors in to do the performance all over again, and this second performance was specially recorded for posterity due to its evident cultural significance.

It’s also notable that Verity Lambert, who would go on to be Doctor Who’s first producer, gained her reputation as a gutsy professional when she managed to rescue a live TV play after one of the actors died in the middle of the performance.

Doctor Who, of course, was pre-recorded, but still performed more-or-less as live, with careful planning of actor and camera movements around the studio from scene to scene and limited capacity for retakes. In the early days, cutting the video tape was limited to two cuts per episode.

All of this adds up to a cultural context in which only selected broadcasts of clear cultural value would be preserved, while the bulk of drama, comedy, children’s programming and current affairs would be routinely deleted so that the expensive video tapes could be reused.

Interesting — I periodically slip on remembering how badly off the UK was 50-60 years ago, but I hadn’t realized the BBC was still doing major work live in 1984, where multiple takes and massive editing were standard in the US much earlier. The point about the cultural approach is also news, but not surprising given the … variable … respect for theater in the US.